Cisco Wi-Fi 6 and SD-WAN Solutions Empower AmCare Women’s & Children’s Hospital to Set a New Benchmark in Smart Healthcare

In recent years, the rapid development of digital technologies has fundamentally transformed people’s production and lifestyles, and the healthcare industry is no exception. General and specialized hospitals are accelerating their digital transformation to harness the digital dividend, build smart healthcare systems, and provide patients with a more convenient and seamless medical experience.

Recently, Cisco facilitated the comprehensive network upgrade of Amcare Women’s and Children’s Hospital through its leading Wi-Fi 6 and SD-WAN solutions, delivering high-performance networking and a premium customer experience. This initiative helps consolidate Amcare’s position as a premier international private hospital for women and children, setting a new benchmark for digital transformation in the high-end healthcare sector.

Amcare Women’s and Children’s Hospital is an international high-end private hospital specializing in women’s and children’s healthcare, established in Beijing in 2006. Amcare boasts a unique medical safety system and a rigorous quality management model, offering a comprehensive range of professional services including obstetrics, gynecology, pediatrics, assisted reproduction, postpartum rehabilitation, postpartum recovery, and medical aesthetics. It is committed to delivering all-encompassing, integrated experiences to clients through one-stop services. In recent years, Amcare has experienced rapid growth and expansion, currently operating 14 chain facilities across China, covering the three major regions of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Pearl River Delta.

Amcare is committed to providing customers with high-quality service experience standards, requiring that the networks of all acquired and newly built hospitals meet consistent high standards. Therefore, it is urgent to comprehensively upgrade the existing networks of acquired hospitals and integrate them into Amcare’s unified network system. This approach not only reduces management and operational maintenance costs but also addresses the critical need for network stability inherent in hospital operations. Furthermore, with the advancement of smart healthcare and the growing number of connected IoT devices, even higher requirements for network stability have been imposed.

Cisco Wi-Fi 6 offers unique advantages, including low latency, high speed, seamless roaming, interference-free operation, increased network capacity, and support for a wider variety of medical IoT device connections, perfectly meeting the needs of Amcare.

Wi-Fi 6 is four times faster than previous Wi-Fi standards, significantly enhancing the user experience for bandwidth-intensive applications in hospitals—such as medical imaging transmission, voice, and video—while ensuring rapid and seamless wireless roaming across hospital wards. Its superior RF technology prevents any interference with medical equipment.

Cisco SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) offers customers advantages such as cost savings, optimized user experience, enhanced stability, seamless scalability, and centralized management. By transforming standard internet connections into secure SD-WAN tunnels, it can significantly reduce the costs associated with redundant links in hospitals.

Regarding future costs, hospitals adopting SD-WAN no longer need to purchase numerous additional dedicated lines, thereby reducing future expenditures. SD-WAN enables load balancing across WAN links for various hospital services, optimizing link utilization and user experience. In the event of a primary link failure, SD-WAN supports automatic failover to redundant links, ensuring the stability of hospital operations.

Under traditional WAN architecture, each branch network has its own settings, requiring IT staff to manage every network device separately within the independent networks of each branch, which is highly cumbersome. In contrast, SD-WAN enables seamless policy consistency. By adopting a single WAN fabric, all policies and configurations can be centrally managed, significantly simplifying network management across the entire hospital.

Currently, multiple campuses under Amcare have deployed Cisco solutions, successfully establishing high-speed network access and a stable network environment. This meets their network and operational requirements, delivering a high-quality service experience to expectant mothers and their families throughout the entire care journey. The comprehensive network upgrade has eliminated connectivity barriers between branch hospitals, facilitating centralized management while reducing IT management costs and ensuring a premium network experience.

Patients can independently create medical records, schedule appointments, view medical histories, make payments, and print reports via a mobile mini-program. Physicians can access real-time test results and patients’ historical prenatal health data directly in the consultation room. Big data analytics enable precise identification of high-risk pregnant women, facilitating tiered management based on risk levels. The system captures waiting times at various service touchpoints; proactive manual intervention is provided for patients experiencing excessive wait times. In inpatient settings and selected outpatient scenarios, nurses use handheld PDAs to verify patient identities and cross-check pending procedures, thereby ensuring the safety of medical practices.

Dr. Hu Lan, Founder and CEO of Amcare Healthcare, stated, “With the rapid advancement of emerging technologies, digital transformation has been accelerating across various industries in recent years. As a leading hospital in the sector, we have been committed to setting new benchmarks for high-quality transformation and upgrading in the healthcare industry. We aim to leverage smart healthcare solutions to provide more convenient service experiences for expectant mothers and their families. High-standard network infrastructure serves as the cornerstone of smart healthcare. Cisco’s solutions have made our network more intelligent, stable, manageable, and scalable. We are delighted to have Cisco supporting and safeguarding our digital journey.”

As a global leader in the IT and networking industry, Cisco provides comprehensive solutions tailored to the diverse needs of various sectors. Through leading technologies such as Wi-Fi 6 and SD-WAN, Cisco enables more devices to connect reliably to networks, which is of critical importance for mission-critical equipment used in many industries, including healthcare.

To support the development of networking in the healthcare industry, Cisco has also been committed to advancing the establishment of industry standards. As early as 2005, Cisco formed a joint research team with a large comprehensive Grade III Class A hospital directly affiliated with the National Health Commission, successfully verifying that wireless local area networks (WLANs) do not cause undue interference with hospital medical equipment. This provided a scientific basis for the formulation of the “Deployment Guidelines for Hospital Wireless Local Area Networks (Draft)” tailored to China’s healthcare industry.

Through the case of Amcare, Cisco has once again helped the healthcare industry unlock its digital potential, working hand in hand with customers to move toward a new future of smart healthcare. Innovation is the key to the industry’s digital transformation. Cisco will continue to focus on cutting-edge technology, empowering customers to actively explore digital innovation and bring significant change and transformation to the healthcare industry.

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